Melissa S.
5.0 out of 5 starsInformative and Heartbreaking Book
February 7, 2017
Format: Mass Market Paperback
“Witness to War: An American Doctor in El Salvador” by Dr. Charles Clements is part memoir, part ethnography, part history text, part war memorial. This book is a triumph, one I recommend EVERYONE read.

“Witness to War” is a difficult book to absorb. The challenging content includes the subject matter of the civil war in El Salvador in the early 1980s (complete with many anecdotes of atrocities), the author’s adherence to Quaker principles of pacifism in the face of government brutality, and the involvement of the United States government in funding the death squads of El Salvador — as well as the United States funding of the relentless state-sanctioned massacres of civilians by the army of El Salvador — make this one of the most painful books I’ve ever set out to finish. In addition to the difficult content, “Witness to War” wasn’t penned to be a literary work. The prose is straightforward, and the story doesn’t use suspense as a plot device. Facts are told in a straightforward manner, details are delivered bluntly, and the result is a raw honesty on the page that is astonishing as well as heartbreaking.

I really love this book. I felt like I took an entire class on the history of El Salvador by reading “Witness to War.” The author took so many risks, and sacrificed so much of his personal life, in order to live among the guerrillas of El Salvador for an entire year, caring for the medical needs of civilians (and sometimes, the soldiers — both the guerrillas and the army POWs captured by the guerrillas) who were injured and killed during this conflict.

“Witness to War” is an amazing achievement. I’m so glad that Dr. Charles Clements journeyed to El Salvador on a personal humanitarian mission, wrote this book, and shared this story with the world. It’s a brutally important book to read, full of truths about imperialism, injustice, and resistance, as well as the specific civil war in El Salvador.

“Witness to War” had so much to teach me. I express my profound gratitude for the opportunity to read this great book. Thank you, Dr. Clements, for this truly significant memoir. “Witness to War” is a heartbreaking treasure, a beautiful testament to the goodness and perseverance of the people of El Salvador. I deeply appreciate getting to know this country and its people much better….”

Witness to War: Doctor Charlie Clements Interview

The Film Archives
Published on Jun 30, 2012”
Charlie Clements currently serves as the Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. From 2003 to 2010, Dr. Clements served as President and CEO of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, and before that he was the President of Physicians for Human Rights.

Dr. Clements wrote Witness to War, which was published in 1983. This book chronicles experience as a distinguished graduate of the Air Force Academy who had flown more than 50 missions in the Vietnam War. He decided the war was immoral and refused to fly missions in support of the invasion of Cambodia. Later, as a newly trained physician, he chose to work in the midst of El Salvador’s civil war, where the villages he served were bombed, rocketed, or strafed by some of the same aircraft in which he had previously trained.”
*no “evidence” of arms smuggling from Soviet Union through Nicaragua!

The Violence Central American Migrants Are Fleeing Was Stoked by the US .vice.com “..As courts, law enforcement, and the Trump administration continue to sort out what to do with the steady stream of migrants either crossing the southern border illegally or seeking asylum, the roots of the current misery are often forgotten. The desperate border-crossers often come from Central America’s “Northern Triangle”—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—and are fleeing high homicide rates and violence in those countries. But this instability did not arise in a vacuum. Many historians and policy experts are quick to point out that much of the troubles in Central America were created or at least helped by the US’s interference in those countries going back decades. In other words, the foreign policy of the past has profoundly shaped the present immigration crisis…”

United States calls situation in El Salvador a communist plot – HISTORY history.com“..In both nations, Reagan officials were convinced that the Soviet Union was the catalyst for the troubles. To address the situation in Nicaragua, the Reagan administration began to covertly assist the so-called Contras-rebel forces that opposed the Sandinista regime and were based primarily in Honduras and Costa Rica. For El Salvador, the February 19 report was the first volley. The State Department memorandum indicated that the “political direction, organization and arming of the Salvadoran insurgency is coordinated and heavily influenced by Cuba with the active support of the Soviet Union, East Germany, Vietnam and other communist states.” It thereupon provided a “chronology” of the communist involvement in El Salvador…”

“…The FMLN was supported by the Nicaraguan, Cuban, and Soviet governments. Most people who have studied the conflict in El Salvador would argue that the Soviets did not provide much direct support to the guerrillas. I agree – but Nicaragua and Cuba would not have been able to provide support to the guerrillas had the Soviets not been supporting them. It’s also true that the FMLN did not get as much military and financial support from these two governments as the Salvadoran government received from the United States.

Most postwar discourse has been driven by elites who participated in the conflict either on the part of the guerrillas or the government. It’s not that these individuals’ perspectives are wrong; it is just healthier if they are challenged or supplemented by outside views. Those could come from more objective academics or from non-elite testimonies such as those provided by Lotti Silber in Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador and by Carlos Enrique Consalvi and Jeffrey Gould in La Palabra en El Bosque. These two works let the people of Chalatenango and Morazán, the two departments most affected by the war, tell their own stories.
..”

Cold War – Nicaragua, El Salvador, Archbishop Romero – YouTube

El Salvador and the School of the Americas Part 1 – YouTube

Dirty Hands BENJAMIN SCHWARZ DECEMBER 1998 ISSUE theatlantic.com“..In El Salvador the United States sought to transform the country while allied with the devil it had to subdue. Whether the geopolitical stakes demanded that involvement and whether letting events take their own course would have resulted in even more atrocities can be debated. What is indisputable is that for a decade American policymakers in Washington and American civilian and military personnel in El Salvador consorted with murderers and sadists.

As LeoGrande’s account — if not always his assessment — makes clear, this pact with the devil was made not by the Administration of the aggressively anti-Communist Republican Ronald Reagan but by that of the moderate Democrat Jimmy Carter — ironically, a President deeply committed to emphasizing human rights in his foreign policy. Simply put, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and with Cuban and Soviet influence apparently growing throughout the Third World generally and in Nicaragua specifically, the Carter Administration believed that global containment required the United States to forestall a revolution in El Salvador led by the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN), a loose alliance of Marxist guerrilla groups tied to Cuba and the Sandinistas of Nicaragua.

..

El Salvador was ripe for revolution. Its society, in which a small landed elite dominated an exploited peasant labor force, was grossly inequitable even by Latin American standards. That elite ruled the country in partnership with its guardian, the military, which had a long tradition of bloody repression of dissenters and revolutionaries, whom it tended to view as one and the same. Although the Carter Administration was troubled by the abysmal human-rights record of El Salvador’s rightist regime, it feared “another Nicaragua.” So when in late 1980 a rebel victory appeared imminent unless the United States provided military and other forms of aid to the Salvadoran regime, Carter chose to assist the Salvadoran government, and thus hesitantly embarked on the policy that the Reagan Administration would later pursue with alacrity…

In the year leading up to Carter’s decision the Salvadoran armed forces and the right-wing death squads linked to them had killed more than 8,000 noncombatant civilians — among them four U.S. churchwomen….

With lavish brutality the military failed to distinguish between dissenters and revolutionaries; many of its victims were unconnected to the FMLN, but enough were connected that the guerrillas’ political infrastructure was destroyed. The guerrillas simply did not have enough allies left alive in San Salvador to organize a general strike…”

There is a tremendous irony that President George W Bush has chosen to visit El Salvador on the anniversary of the murder of the country’s Archbishop, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, 22 years ago.

A campaigner against the Salvadorean army’s death squad war, Monsignor Romero was shot through the heart while saying Mass, shortly after appealing to the US not to send military aid to El Salvador.

US officials are saying that President Bush’s visit is in part to celebrate a US success story in which his father was personally involved

The appeal fell on deaf ears and for the next 12 years, the US became involved in its largest counter-insurgency war against left-wing guerrillas since Vietnam…”

How U.S. Involvement In Central America Led To a Border Crisis| AJ+

AJ+
Published on Jul 8, 2018
Thousands of Central American refugees and migrants have been coming to the Mexico-U.S. border for almost 40 years – and in spring of 2018, the Trump administration enacted a “zero-tolerance” policy that led to the arrest of any and all refugees and migrants attempting to cross the border into the United States. The most controversial aspect of the policy’s enforcement was the forced separation of parents from their children. While much of the conversation has focused on Central Americans escaping violence, there hasn’t been much on why there’s so much violence in the region to begin with. The story? Almost 200 years of U.S. intervention.

EDIT: We messed up on certain map animations, excluding the nation of Belize – it was unintentional. Thanks to everyone who highlighted this to us.

Economics

El Salvador’s Top 10 Exports August 1, 2018 by Daniel Workman .worldstopexports.com“..El Salvador’s unemployment rate was projected to be 7.1% as of June 2018 according to Trading Economics.
El Salvador’s Top 10 Exports

The following export product groups represent the highest dollar value in Salvadoran global shipments during 2017 at the 2-digit Harmonized Tariff System (HTS) code level. Also shown is the percentage share each export category represents in terms of overall exports from El Salvador.

Drilling down to the more detailed 4-digit HTS codes, El Salvador’s most valuable exported goods are T-shirts, jerseys, overcoats, pantyhose, underwear and socks.

United States Immigrants

George To The Rescue
Published on Sep 29, 2018
George spearheads exterior and basement transformations for first-time homeowners embodying the American Dream.

Notables

Cnel. José Arturo Castellanos geni.com“..José Arturo Castellanos Contreras (San Vicente, El Salvador, December 23, 1893 — San Salvador, June 18, 1977) was a Salvadoran army colonel and diplomat who, while working as El Salvador’s Consul General for Geneva during World War II, and in conjunction with a Jewish-Hungarian businessman named György Mandl, helped save up to 40,000 Jews and Central Europeans from Nazi persecution by providing them with false papers of Salvadoran nationality…”

Castellanos Movie
Published on Sep 3, 2017
The story of Col. José Arturo Castellanos – the Salvadoran diplomat who defied the nazis and saved thousands of Jewish lives during the holocaust – as told by his Canadian grandchildren Alvaro and Boris Castellanos in the performative documentary: The Rescue – A Live Film-Concerto. Live performance filmed on June 14, 2017 in Toronto. http://www.castellanosmovie.com/

U.S. borders are a lot more secure under Trump: Border Patrol Union Presidenthttps://youtu.be/cvALg6qElmM
Fox Business
Published on Sep 21, 2017

10 Reasons The US Needs Better Border Security By Dave Anderson – May 25, 2016 listland.com“…The real concern that many have is that unregulated and illegal immigration will give rise to social problems, threatening jobs, overwhelming the amenity provision in border areas and threatening the traditional American way of life…

Most countries regulate who may enter and why, whether as short term visitors or to live and work so there is no shame in the US doing likewise. Indeed as a nation the US has very strict entry visa requirements. Nevertheless voters, particularly in border states, concerns continue to express concerns about the policies used to secure the border and the funding given to finance enforcement. The debate tends to polarize into two separate camps with typical Republican voters arguing that more funding needs to be diverted to secure the borders. Meanwhile Democrats tend to espouse the idea that immigration is generally a positive and want to make it easier for illegals to legalize their status reflecting the de-facto reality of life on the ground.

We believe that border security should be viewed as a priority and furthermore 71% of Americans agree with us. Here are 10 of the reasons we believe better border security is vital for America…”

Solutions for America: Developing a Strong Border and Immigration Policy August 17, 2010 4 min read heritage.org“..For far too long, the United States has failed to enforce its immigration laws. Its visa system does not adequately serve the needs of the economy, legal immigrants, or U.S. citizens. Cartel violence and continued illegal immigration along the U.S. southern border have many Americans concerned. Americans are demanding a border and immigration policy that will keep the U.S. free, safe, and prosperous—not an amnesty that simply exacerbates the problem.

Border Violence on the Rise, Illegal Immigration Continues. The U.S. has made progress on securing the border, but the border is still not secure. Drug cartels have seized control of major parts of Mexico’s northern border—with more than 6,000 murders in 2008 from drug cartel violence. The threat of spillover violence in the U.S., as well as continued illegal immigration, remains a significant problem. …”

“..A man in the U.S. illegally has been charged with murder in the death of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts, police announced Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, was charged with murder in connection to the death of Tibbetts, 20, who had been missing for more than a month before authorities discovered her body this week.

If convicted, Rivera could face life in prison, the AP reported…”Cristhian Bahena Rivera: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know“..Rivera confessed to killing Tibbetts and has been charged with first-degree murder, police said. He is a resident of rural Poweshiek County, Iowa, and has lived in the area for about four to seven years, according to police. He faces a penalty of life in prison without parole. Rivera, a 24-year-old Mexican citizen, is being held on an immigration detainer and police said they confirmed with the Department of Homeland Security Investigations that he is an “illegal alien,” DCI Special Agent Richard Rahn said at a press conference…

President Donald Trump talked about the case at a rally in West Virginia hours after Rivera’s arrest:

Iowa murder suspect lived on land owned by GOP fundraiser RYAN J. FOLEY,Associated Press 14 hours ago (8.25.18) yahoo.com“IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — A top Republican fundraiser whose firm works for several prominent immigration hardliners is the partial owner of the land where the Mexican man accused of killing Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts lived rent-free, a farm spokeswoman said Friday.

Nicole Schlinger has long been a key fundraiser and campaign contractor for GOP politicians in Iowa and beyond, including this cycle for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Virginia Senate candidate Corey Stewart.

Schlinger is the president of Campaign Headquarters, a call center that makes fundraising calls, identifies supporters and helps turn out voters for conservative candidates and groups. Her business is one of the largest in Brooklyn, the central Iowa town where Tibbetts disappeared while out for a run on July 18.

Schlinger is married to Eric Lang, the president of the family-owned dairy that has acknowledged providing employment and housing for the last four years to Cristhian Bahena Rivera, the man charged with murder in Tibbetts’ death.

The couple — along with her husband’s brother Craig Lang and his wife — own farmland outside Brooklyn that includes trailers where some of the dairy’s employees live for free as a benefit of their employment, farm spokeswoman Eileen Wixted confirmed.

She said Rivera lived there for the duration of his employment, and about half of the farm’s other 10 workers do so as well. Under the arrangement, the farming company pays the couples to rent the land but workers do not have to pay, she said.

In an email Friday, Schlinger said that she was “shocked and deeply saddened” by Tibbetts’ death and had never met Rivera. “The perpetrator should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, and when he meets his maker, suffer the consequences he deserves,” she wrote.

She said that she was gifted an ownership interest in the land many years ago from her husband’s family and that she has no role in the farming operation.

Still, the fact that one of its own operatives has indirect ties to the case could complicate GOP efforts to highlight the gruesome slaying in its political messaging ahead of the November midterm election. Dairy co-owner Craig Lang also was a Republican candidate for Iowa agriculture secretary, finishing third in a five-way race in the June primary.

Republicans such as President Donald Trump and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds called for stricter immigration laws and enforcement almost immediately after Rivera, who is suspected of being in the country illegally, was charged Tuesday. Some have blamed Democratic policies for the slaying, even though studies have disputed the notion that those in the country illegally are more likely to commit violent crime.

“Every victim below would be alive today if we enforced our immigration laws,” U.S. Rep. Steve King of Iowa tweeted Friday, above a picture of Tibbetts and other victims. “Leftists sacrificed thousands, including their own, on the altar of Political Correctness.”

Schlinger’s business calls itself “the best conservative call center in America.” Her biography claims she is the most prolific fundraiser in Iowa GOP history, having brought in more than $50 million for politicians and causes. She has said her business has made millions of phone calls for candidates seeking offices ranging from president to city council since its founding in 1999. Her firm’s client list includes several politicians who routinely call for stricter immigration enforcement.

Federal Election Commission records show that Cruz’s re-election campaign has paid CampaignHQ nearly $1.7 million since the beginning of 2017. A Cruz campaign spokeswoman had no immediate comment…”

Neutral Perspective

-Stats

5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S. pewresearch.org“..Mexicans may no longer be the majority of U.S. unauthorized immigrants. They made up half of all unauthorized immigrants in 2016, according to the Center’s preliminary estimate, marking the first time in at least a decade that they did not account for a clear majority of this population. Their numbers (and share of the total) have been declining in recent years: There were 5.6 million Mexican unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2015 and 2016, down from 6.4 million in 2009.

Meanwhile, the number of unauthorized immigrants from nations other than Mexico has grown since 2009, from 5 million that year to 5.4 million in 2015. Non-Mexicans numbered 5.7 million in the preliminary 2016 estimate, a total that was not statistically different from 2015…

The U.S. civilian workforce includes 8 million unauthorized immigrants, accounting for 5% of those who were working or were unemployed and looking for work, according to separate Pew Research Center estimates. ..”Mexicans No Longer Make Up Majority Of Immigrants In U.S. Illegally April 25, 20175:41 PM ET npr.org“..Their analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data shows that last year, there were 5.6 million Mexican nationals living in the U.S. without authorization – half of the unauthorized immigrant population in 2016. Mexicans have been the majority of that population since 2005, according to the Pew report.

Although Mexicans still make up the largest group of unauthorized immigrants, numbers from Mexico have been on the decline since the Great Recession began in late 2007.

The number of unauthorized immigrants from other countries has been on the rise since the end of the recession, hitting an estimated 5.7 million in 2016. Immigrants from Central America and Asia – largely from India and China — are two of the main drivers of that growth…”

Top 10 Pro & Con Arguments immigration.procon.org
Should the Government Allow Immigrants Who Are Here Illegally to Become US Citizens?

The Great Debate: Solving the US Illegal Immigration … – YouTube

Boston University
Published on Apr 6, 2010
Can Stricter Law Enforcement at the Border and the Workplace Solve the U.S. Illegal Immigration Problem? was the topic of the College of Communication’s 24th semiannual Great Debate, argued in the affirmative by Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., Stephanie Hoffman (LAW’10), and Louis J. Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, Pa., where local businesses and landlords may be punished by law for giving work or shelter to illegal immigrants. The negative side was argued by B. Lindsay Lowell, the director of policy studies at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, Anuj Shelat (SMG’08), and Shuya Ohno, the director of communications at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA).

-Crime

Is Illegal Immigration Linked to More or Less Crime? By Robert Farley Posted on June 27, 2018 factcheck.org“..President Donald Trump said it’s “not true” that immigrants in the U.S. illegally are “safer than the people that live in the country,” providing several crime statistics he claimed represented the “toll of illegal immigration.” Sen. Bernie Sanders made the opposite claim, saying: “I understand that the crime rate among undocumented people is actually lower than the general population.”

Who is right?

There are not readily available nationwide statistics on all crimes committed by immigrants in the country illegally. Researchers have provided estimates through statistical modeling or by extrapolating from smaller samples. One such study backs the president’s claim, but several others support Sanders’ statement…”

Fact Check: Do illegal immigrants commit more crimes?

MrDemented669
7 months ago
if you cross a border illegal you just broke one law so fact is that makes them all criminals.﻿

The Oregonian
Published on Oct 20, 2017
A video shared over 5,000 times on Facebook shows self-identified plainclothes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entering a Portland home and arresting a man, without getting permission to enter the home and without a warrant. ICE later released the man, identified only as Carlos

ICE agents approach Latino US citizen, mistake him for … – YouTube

The Oregonian
Published on Sep 20, 2017
An Oregon ACLU legal observer captures footage of a legal citizen being approached by ICE agents near the Washington County Courthouse in Hillsboro on Sept. 18 after they confused him for an undocumented immigrant.

“I don’t want Mollie’s memory to get lost amongst politics,” Calderwood told CNN. “It’s not about race, it’s about people joining together to do good.”

Tibbetts’ distant cousin, Sam Lucas, also spoke out on Twitter, slamming conservative activist Candace Owens for using the death to attack “illegal immigrants.”..

“Hey i’m a member of mollie’s family and we are not so f***ing small-minded that we generalize a whole population based on some bad individuals. now stop being a f***ing snake and using my cousins death as political propaganda. take her name out of your mouth,” she wrote on Twitter Tuesday.
..”

Stop blaming the “other” political party for where we are at! “We” caused this on ourselves…

Here are some facts:

Trump Feeding “Tear Away” Immigrant Kids to America’s “Elite Pedophiles” By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor – June 17, 2018 veteranstoday.com“..The “elites,” as they love calling themselves, who own the Federal Reserve, run Washington and London, who start our wars, loot our economy, run our media, control our lives, live on a diet of ritual sexual abuse, sex hormones and amphetamines…

Their diet of stolen children come from families destroyed by narcotics or targeted by fake courts and fake police. Kids seized by “family services” are picked through and fed into the rape and murder mill of the real “Pizzagate,” built around those who own the GOP….

In America, it began with “boy’s homes” and detention centers. It began with teenage boys but, as it moved on, it became smaller and smaller children…

Kids that hit the US border, and this is Trump’s doing 100%, are picked through like meat, the “prime kids” are sent off to pedophile rings run by Trump cronies, to be passed around Pentagon brass, Tea Party get togethers and among the GOP faithful. They are stored at elite hunting “camps” and “religious retreats” owned by billionaires and big corporate donors. We aren’t making this up, it isn’t fake news and it was originally “busted” as the Franklin Scandal…”

The Franklin Scandal – YouTube

Oct 17, 2009 – Uploaded by trinedaybooks“Video account of child pornography, sex rings, government coverup and innocent kids being sent to jail, based …”

Major documentary on highest-level child sex-abuse is suppressed Listen | Print By Ralph Lopez Aug 14, 2014 in World digitaljournal.com“..On May 3rd, 1994, the Discovery Channel was set to air Conspiracy of Silence, an hour-long documentary on a network of Nebraska businessmen and Washington politicians who flew children, some under age ten, to Washington D.C. for sex orgies. ..”

Inside Casa Padre, the converted Walmart where the U.S. is holding nearly 1,500 immigrant children by Michael E. Miller, Emma Brown and Aaron C. Davis June 14 2018 washingtonpost.com“..Texas-based Southwest Key has grown quickly in recent years, fueled by surges of young Central Americans seeking refuge north, an expansion that has helped push annual compensation for the nonprofit’s chief executive, Juan Sanchez, to nearly $1.5 million, filings with the Internal Revenue Service show. The organization now houses 5,129 immigrant children in three states — approaching half the approximately 11,400 currently in federal custody — in facilities that are being strained to capacity, according to Sanchez…”

DACA: What you need to know CBS News January 24, 2018, 6:00 AM cbsnews.com“..The government is open again, and now the fight begins over securing the fate of several hundred thousand immigrants known as Dreamers. To end the shutdown, Democrats exacted a promise from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to bring a legislative fix for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival recipients (DACA) to the floor on Feb. 8, if government remains open (that’s when the new short-term spending bill expires).

Congress will now try and come up with a solution for the undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, in balance with upgrades in border security. Here are some of the questions about DACA and about the challenges ahead:..”

Family separation crisis: How we got here Author: Suzanne Nuyen
Published: 1:37 PM EDT June 18, 2018 kare11.com
Since the Trump administration rolled out its ‘zero tolerance’ policy on immigration, about 2,000 children have been separated from their parents. “The Trump administration has said its “zero tolerance” policy on immigration is an effort to deter individuals from entering the U.S. illegally.

Since its rollout, about 2,000 children have been separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border.

Here’s a look at how this policy came to be:

March 2017: Former Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly confirms that the administration was considering the policy of separating families as a deterrent to illegal immigration. Nearly 200 national, state and local organizations write a letter to Kelly in opposition of the policy. Multiple members of Congress also write letters to Homeland Security. ..”

Jeff Sessions’ church slams his use of the Bible to defend separating migrant families“..Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a United Methodist, and he is also the face of the Trump administration’s widely condemned policy of separating migrant children from their families at the border. In a Friday statement slamming the policy as “a shocking violation of the spirit of the Gospel,” the United Methodist Church registered its dissent to Sessions’ use of the Bible to defend the separations: Jesus is our way, our truth, our life. The Christ we follow would have no part in ripping children from their mothers’ arms or shunning those fleeing violence. It is unimaginable that faith leaders even have to say that these policies are antithetical to the teachings of Christ. Christian sacred texts ….”

Trump blames Democrats for a law that separates undocumented immigrant children from their families. Some Democrats blame Trump’s administration for losing track of nearly 1,500 immigrant kids.

None of this is accurate.

We’ve fact-checked many claims about the border, and it’s clear that the latest spin from both sides deserves a turn under the microscope. However, since this is a roundup of multiple claims, we won’t be giving Pinocchio ratings.
…

Trump tweeted “Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border into the U.S. Catch and Release, Lottery and Chain must also go with it and we MUST continue building the WALL! DEMOCRATS ARE PROTECTING MS-13 THUGS..”

President Obama is showing little concern for international law, and none at all for Washington’s historic responsibility in Central America.

“..
…The Ramirezes (their names have been changed to protect them from retribution) got through Mexico and crossed the Rio Grande just south of here safely, but Esperanza, who is 24, has had to live with violence her entire life. She and her daughter had just fled the most dangerous city in the world, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where the two biggest criminal gangs, which have memberships across the region in the tens of thousands, fight with automatic weapons. The city has become a war zone, with a murder rate of 193 per 100,000 (New York City’s rate is 5.1). Angelica’s father died in gang-related violence a couple of years ago. “In some neighborhoods, people are abandoning their homes from fear,” she said. “The gangs are even murdering 8-year-old kids who will not join them.” …

Americans, especially young Americans, probably know more about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda than they do about how their own government funded murderous right-wing dictatorships in Central America back in the 1980s. The Reagan administration’s violent and immoral policy included $5 billion in aid to the military/landowner alliance in El Salvador, which prolonged an awful conflict in which some 75,000 people died—a toll proportionally equivalent to the casualty rate in the American Civil War. But once shaky peace agreements were signed in the 1990s, the United States walked away, leaving the shattered region to rebuild on its own. ..

The very name of one of the giant criminal gangs—18th Street, or Calle 18—reveals the origins of the current crisis. Eighteenth Street is not in San Pedro Sula, or in San Salvador, or in any of the other Central American cities torn apart by gang warfare. Eighteenth Street is actually in Los Angeles, where the gang and its rival, the Mara Salvatrucha, were born among young Salvadorans who had been displaced by the civil war in the 1980s. After the United States started deporting gang members, they arrived back in Central America, some barely speaking Spanish and knowing only how to do one thing: grab the weapons the region was already awash in and start killing. During the decade-long civil war, family and community life had weakened, so the newly arrived gangs partly filled a vacuum…

Here in McAllen, the community center of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church has become a relief station for adults with children who are pouring across the border in the Rio Grande Valley. Children who are by themselves do not come here; they are held in the overcrowded Border Patrol detention centers until a relative who is already in the United States sends them funds for an air ticket to join them, pending a resolution of their immigration case. (Roughly 90 percent of the Central Americans already have a family member in the United States.) ..”

Why Central Americans are fleeing their violent homelands for the US By Danika Fears and Lorena Mongelli April 13, 2017 | 1:26am | Updated nypost.com“..n 2016, El Salvador’s murder rate was 81.2 per 100,000 inhabitants — down from 104 in 2015, the highest in the world. Honduras’ murder rate was 59 last year, while Guatemala’s was 27.3, dropping from a high of 46.5 in 2009.

“There’s no such thing as people going out jogging there,” Ana Quintana, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said of Honduras. “There are 24-hour funeral homes. It’s incredibly sad.”

Civil wars rocked El Salvador and Guatemala until the mid-1990s, leaving them vulnerable to transnational crime outfits — like MS-13, which was created by Salvadorans who fled to LA.

Drug trafficking from South America and Mexico — in which some of the gangs have become involved — has also contributed to the bloodshed.

In 2014, US officials said 80 percent of drug flows into America pass through routes in Central America…”

Deporting people made Central America’s gangs. More deportation won’t help. By Daniel Denvir July 20, 2017 washingtonpost.com‘..“MS-13 is one of the most vicious criminal gangs in this country today,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “As I said when I visited Long Island after these murders took place in April, MS-13’s motto may be ‘kill, rape and control,’ but the Department of Justice’s motto is justice for victims and consequences for criminals.” In April, Sessions made a stop on his immigrants-are-killing-Americans tour in Long Island, where he went further into his view of transnational gangs…

In reality, it is U.S. foreign policy and the very sort of deportation policies Sessions embraces that have created the “horrific violence” and “lawlessness” he expresses concern about, and there’s no reason to believe that continuing these policies will do anything other than cause more harm….

The gang Sessions pinpointed, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), was founded in Los Angeles, as was its rival, Barrio 18. Many of the youths who formed MS-13, and who joined its rival Barrio 18 (initially formed by Mexicans) had fled El Salvador as refugees as civil war raged between 1980 and 1992. At the time, the right-wing military government in El Salvador was backed by President Ronald Reagan’s administration. All in all, the U.S. spent billions of dollars on its dirty war against left-wing rebels of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FLMN. Wars were also ripping apart Guatemala, where the U.S.-backed military committed genocide against indigenous people, and Nicaragua, where the U.S. supported a Contra army that sought to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government because it had dared to depose the right-wing Somoza family dictatorship…

In fiscal 2014, the Border Patrol apprehended almost 137,000 unaccompanied minors and individuals traveling with their families, the majority part of a new refugee exodus from Central America to seek asylum from violent conflicts between gangs and governments in their deeply impoverished native lands…

. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility law, which made it far easier for the government to deport people convicted of certain crimes, including relatively minor ones and crimes committed by lawful permanent residents. At the same time, the INS Violent Gang Task Force, created in 1992, was working with local police to target immigrant gang members for deportation. In 2005, ICE’s Operation Community Shield was launched to target MS-13…

..Since taking office, President Trump has proclaimed that his government is “actually liberating towns” from the gang’s clutches and falsely claimed that he has deported half of the gang’s U.S.-based membership. He has blamed “weak illegal immigration policies” under President Barack Obama for allowing the gang to spread, calling it “a serious problem” that “we never did anything about.” In fact, deporting alleged gang members had been a bipartisan priority for three presidential administrations. And for presidents from both parties, the emphasis on gangs has served the same purpose: fomenting public anxiety over crime and foreigners in the service of a system that mostly deports immigrants who have been convicted of no violent crime…

The tragic upshot is that, thanks to flashy headlines about international gang violence, people are primed to support the same sort of policies that created this spiraling crisis in the first place: deporting Central Americans, refugees and alleged gang members alike, while funding law-and-order crackdowns and business-friendly economic reforms in the region that can only make things worse. We are not importing Central American problems. Rather, it is the U.S. that has exported violence, time and again, to Central America.”

ICE Repatriation Flights to Central America

What happens to migrant children who get deported back to Central America?

CBS This Morning
Published on Jul 25, 2014
Many undocumented migrant children who fail to reach the U.S. are sent home to Central America. Manuel Bojorquez recently traveled to El Salvador to find what is waiting for them when they arrive home.

Why so many migrant kids are coming to the U.S. alone

PBS NewsHour
Published on Jun 20, 2014
Hoping to stop the surge of unaccompanied minors arriving in the U.S., Vice President Biden visited Guatemala to get support from Central American leaders. The NewsHour’s P.J. Tobia reports on why kids are coming and what happens to these child migrants when they arrive.

Immigrant America: The High Cost of Deporting Parents

VICE News
Published on Mar 19, 2014
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As Barack Obama considers ways to enforce immigration laws “more humanely,” VICE News travels to Guatemala to meet a deportee named Ray Jesus, who lives apart from his American wife and 5 American children. When Ray lived in the U.S., he was the family’s breadwinner. Now they rely on welfare to get by. It turns out that deporting parents costs much more than the price of a one-way ticket home.”

The incident happened in the city of Bangor over Memorial Day weekend, the ACLU of New Hampshire said in a video statement.

The footage shows passengers being confronted by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent.

“Are you folks U.S. citizens?” the CBP agent asks.

“I’m not answering that question, sir,” a man says in the video…”

VIDEO: Kirstjen Nielsen Driven Out of Mexican Restaurant by Protesters heavy.com“..“Secretary Nielsen, how dare you spend your evening here eating dinner,” the protester shouts, accusing Nielsen in being “complicit” in the separation and deportation of children. Nielsen kept her head down for most of the video and did not interact with the protesters. “Shame! Shame! Shame!” the protesters chanted. They held a sign that said, “no human is illegal.” Men in suits stood between the protesters and the secretary. “End family separation,” the protesters shouted. “If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace.” They shouted, “Not in D.C. Not in the U.S.” and “In a Mexican restaurant of all places….The F*cking gall. Shame on you….fascist pig.” They also shouted, “Abolish ICE” and “No borders, no wall, sanctuaries for all.” ..”

The photo of a nearly 2-year-old Honduran girl crying as her mother is being patted down quickly went viral. It also has been used for a Facebook fundraiser to raise more than $18 million to help reunite families that have been separated. And the whole thing culminated in its placement in a photo illustration on the cover of Time magazine. The image on the July 2 issue features the girl against a red background, with President Donald Trump towering over her and the words, “Welcome to America.”

The implication was clear: This was a girl who, like 2,300 other children, was being separated from her mother. Time and many others made a decision to suggest that this was an example of Trump uprooting our American ideals.

But that’s not what it was. As The Washington Post’s Samantha Schmidt and Kristine Phillips report, the girl’s father says the child and her mother were never separated. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol confirmed it, as did the Honduran deputy foreign minister.

The image is a sad one, but it is of a rather standard occurrence at the border: A mother and her daughter attempted to immigrate illegally and were apprehended. The mother, in fact, had tried this before and was deported in 2013. The photo says virtually nothing about Trump’s now-aborted policy. In fact, it’s an example of how not all young children were separated from their parents…”